Here's what the Fed could have bought with QE3

Barring a major unanticipated shock, the Federal Reserve will announce this week after a two-day meeting in Washington that it will cut its bond purchases to $25 billion a month in August and September. Then, at its September and October meetings, it will successively cut the purchases down to $15 billion and finally zero.

At that point, the Fed’s purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities in its latest round of so-called quantitative easing, begun in late 2012, will total $1.603 trillion. For perspective, if the Fed were allowed to buy stocks, at current prices it could have bought Apple, Google and Microsoft for that sum — with General Motors and Ford thrown into the mix, with $44 billion left over.